


the ghosts in the shadows

by withoutwords



Category: Animal Kingdom (TV)
Genre: Angst, Flashbacks, Future Fic, M/M, Mentions of past abuse, Recreational Drug Use, Second person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 01:46:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9797030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withoutwords/pseuds/withoutwords
Summary: Deran shows up mid-March with nothing but a duffel bag and a new haircut. You know you shouldn’t be surprised – this is Deran all over – but you hadn’t trekked across the country for the nice weather. You were moving on from California, and bad blood, and him. Only now he’s here, at your door, saying,“Hey,” like he’d just gone out for some milk.“What the fuck, man?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so, after mainlining the deran/adrian storyline and being generally screwed up about it, this is a story about them getting out, and moving on. well, from everything except each other.
> 
> thanks so much for reading :)

_I’ve been trying to fix my pride,_

_but that shit’s broken._

_[Jon Bellion]_

 

 

Deran shows up mid-March with nothing but a duffel bag and a new haircut. You know you shouldn’t be surprised – this is Deran all over – but you hadn’t trekked across the country for the nice weather. You were moving on from California, and bad blood, and him. Only now he’s here, at your door, saying,

“Hey,” like he’d just gone out for some milk.

“What the fuck, man?”

He laughs. The honest, eye-crinkling laughter that you saw so little of after you left Belize. It clogs in your throat like dirty weed. “Yeah.”

Your hand’s tight around the edge of the door, and you’re thinking about how you could use it if he tried to push through. You’re thinking about hurting him and he’s just _standing there_. (You hate who he made you become.) “You should go.”

“I’m just passing through, alright?”

“Oh, really? To where, exactly? Haiti?”

Deran just shrugs. His eyes run up and down you like he’s committing you to memory. You’re bigger, and you’ve seen a lot of sun, and you’ve let your hair grow out a bit. But under that gaze you feel exactly the same. Small. Weak. “Sure, why not?”

“Well, have fun,” you say, trying to close the door, but he throws a hand out to stop it. You know he sees the way you flinch.

“Adrian. I’m not here to – I just wanted to say something and then I’m gone. Okay?”

“So say it,” you spit at him, because he could be here to tell you he’s joining a monastery and it still wouldn’t be enough to tame the beast in your bones. You were so sick of being angry. It’s why you left, it’s why you’re here, it’s why you don’t sleep with one eye open any more.

You’re safe from yourself.

“You’re the only person I - ” Deran starts, then huffs, running a hand through his hair. It’s cropped so short it almost stands up, not a single strand to tuck behind his ear.  “Jesus, outside of my family you were the _only_ person. And I wanted you to know that what I did to you, all those things I did to you? It was so wrong.”

You don’t move, but you feel like your whole body is beating. You feel like you can feel your heart slamming against your ribcage.

“I’m not apologising, because I know that’s not worth shit. I’m just saying – you made me better. At least, you could have, if I’d let you.”

You still can’t talk. You don’t owe him anything anyway; you didn’t owe him before he showed up on your doorstep either. No the sleepless nights, not the tears. (Not the goddamn beating, that’s for sure.) 

“Thanks. For everything. I mean it.”

You close the door the minute he turns his back, but you can’t help watching him through the window. Just like the last time he walked out of your life.

Just like the last time you let him.

*

The moon was so big one night it cast the whole room in blue. Blue against the walls, and the sheets, and the long lines of Deran’s body, the bunching muscles in his back and shoulders where he hugged a pillow tight to himself. You liked to watch him like that, when he didn’t know, because then he couldn’t ruin it by saying something ugly.

(He was so beautiful; sometimes it was hard to believe how ugly he could be.)

“You sleepin?” he asked, not _what the fuck’re you looking at_ , not _go to sleep Adrian, Jesus_.

“Yeah,” you said, and rolled onto your back, and watched the blue across the ceiling instead. You could almost pretend you’d both been washed away. Inside a wave, inside the ocean, not worried about where it might take you.

“No you’re not,” Deran teased, and the mattress dipped as he pushed over. “You’re lying.”

You turned your head enough to see him, to see that he was smiling at you. Soft, and tired, and worry free. It was a feat that had only taken two and a half weeks (if you’re not counting all those months you knew him before, all those long hours and days of watching him watch you and wondering is he, would he, _can I_?) “I’m good.”

“You’re good,” he’d repeated back to you, before getting up onto his hands and knees, before coming to hover over you with his hair falling in his face. “You wanna be better?”

“Always.”

Deran was quick to the mark – that was his style in everything – taking your cock in his hand, and running his mouth along the length, and teasing with heat and wetness and wanting sounds that were almost enough to throw you over the edge. 

“I think I could put you to sleep like this,” he’d said around a laugh, before his mouth was full of you, and you were thrusting into him, and you really did get washed away.

In Deran.

*

You know a guy who knows a guy who’s still in the Cody circle. What’s left of the Cody circle. Just before you left it was already a ghost of its former self – like the shell of something that might break open with one small, decisive push. You’d wanted to see it, yourself. You wanted to see it all burn to the ground, and watch them all disappear into the flames. (Except, in the end, the only one getting burned was you.)

When you call the number your friend gave you, it’s late.

“Who’s this?” the voice on the other end says, gruffly, suspiciously.

“Craig?” you start, and it’s almost too hard to say. “It’s Adrian.”

There’s a long pause. You think you hear people, and music in the background but that’s nothing new. Craig always loved a good party. “Fuck. Fuck, man, hang on,” he eventually says, and there’s rustling, and quiet. “Adrian?”

“Yeah.”

Craig takes in a rattly breath. “Oh, shit, don’t tell me. He’s there, isn’t he?”

“He was. I don’t know where he is now.”

“Shit.” He’s quiet again. You’ve always, reluctantly, liked Craig. Never too far up his mom’s ass that he couldn’t see what was right in front of him. “Did he say anything to you?”

“He just came to tell me what I already knew. That I deserved better.”

“Yeah,” Craig says, and you know he agrees. You’re the kid who was always just there, on the outskirts of everything. The kid with good manners, and the kid who turned a blind eye, the kid who could carve good enough he won a few trophies for his trouble. As much as you hated to like him, you know he liked you too. “He tell you the rest?”

“No?”

“He did some time. For a fuckin’ DUI of all things, can you believe that? But, once he got out he booked it. I haven’t seen his face for over a year.”

“A year?” you repeat, more than disbelievingly, because you didn’t know the cord could stretch that long. You didn’t know Deran had enough places to hide from the pull.

“Yeah. I talk to him sometimes, when he feels like calling. He doesn’t say much though.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would."

“How have you been man?” Craig asks, and it just means, _are you staying clean?_ Craig doesn’t know where you are, almost nobody knows where you are. You’d just told your mom not to worry and gotten on a bus going east.

“I’m fine.”

“You should know,” he says, and it sounds a little muffled. “He told me everything. About you, about what he did.”

“He did a lot of things.”

“I know.”

You feel your breath catch on nothing, suddenly getting to your feet. You’ve spent a long time trying not to think about it, and this is all it takes to bring it flooding back. “Well, I just wanted to let you know I saw him. That’s all.”

“Yeah, okay. Thanks man.” Craig waits. “And take care of yourself, alright?”

You hang up with a shaky breath and don’t bother saving the number.

*

Deran had always been wild. Wild, and unpredictable, like the ocean beneath your board, or the asphalt under your wheels. You’re sure it’s what he always knew – dancing to his own beat, living by his own rules (or at least the rules his mother okayed first). You’re sure as much as that’s Deran – surfing, skating, jumping, falling – he was also a thinker, and a dreamer, and a lover.

He was also someone trapped in what he was always supposed to be.

“What sort of name is Deran, anyway?” you’d asked him one night, down by the shore, passing a blunt back and forth. Deran had blown the smoke into your face, smirking. 

“How the fuck should I know? It’s Irish, or Welsh or something.”

“Right,” you had teased, laughing when he’d kicked gently at you, sand flicking up onto your skin.

“What, like Adrian’s fucking poetic.”

“My dad was a big Rocky fan,” you’d told him, and delighted in the huffing laughter.  

“Whatever, man,” he’d said. “It’s just a name.”

“Sometimes your name is everything.” 

Deran had thrown you a look, like he knew exactly what you meant by that, like he could shut you up with just one swing. Deran was just a name, just a nothing, a nobody. It was the Cody that haunted him – haunted you both – it was the Cody that had you by a strangle hold. Every thought and move and word you’d said, like the time you’d joked, _you kiss your mother with that mouth?_ and he’d roared in your face and pushed you off the jetty.  

Everything you did, it was always despite the _Cody_. You were just the last to know it.

“Okay, Shakespeare,” he’d joked, brushing it off. “You gonna hog that all night or what?”

You’d passed him the smoke, and your fingers had brushed, and you’d fought every urge to hold onto him. You were always fighting that.

*

You’re doing okay where you are. The shop’s small, but you always keep the cash flow going; and you know enough people that you’re staying out of trouble. You’ve never needed much. A roof over your head, and something to eat, and a job to keep your hands busy. The _ocean_.

You didn’t grow up believing in family first, or blood is thicker, or any of that shit Deran’s mom used to say to control her sons. You never had money, either, never looked out over the rolling hills of the rich and famous and wondered what it would be like if that was you.

You had what you made of it, and it was enough. (It was just you, that wasn’t, you could never be enough.)

You see Deran again just a few days later, out by the water with a board under his arm. His wet suit’s rolled down to his waist and he looks leaner, cut, with more tattoos on his arms, and at his shoulders. If you were stupid you could almost convince yourself it wasn’t the same guy.

“What are you still doing here?” you hiss at him, once you’re close enough. You could have turned around, walked away, but that would have been easy and nothing about Deran had ever been easy. Why start now?

“I’m staying with a buddy for a while,” he tells you, dropping his board into the sand.

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

Deran’s not looking you in the eye. You stare and stare like you’re willing him to, like you want him to face up to what he’s done. To what he’s doing right now. But he just coasts a hand back and forth over his head, just looks out at the water like always. That was something you always had, the two of you – the water.

“I used to love watching you on a board.”

“Don’t,” you grind out, feeling the muscles in your jaw snag tight.

“I did,” he says, and he’s smiling, and he’s looking at you, properly. “You fuckin’ ripped it, man. You still go out there?”

“All the time,” you say, not dropping your gaze. You expect him to invite you out, or ask you to let him see you again. (See you like that, on your board, completely oblivious to everything.) He doesn’t.

“That’s good.”

“What are you doing here?”

Deran’s quiet. He breathes, taking in the crisp cool air rolling off the sea. You almost have to close your eyes against it.

“I like your hair longer,” he tells you, and that’s jarring enough. When he says, “You look good,” your skin pulls tight because it’s not edged, or promising, or possessive. It’s just _nice_.

You walk away.

*

Your last night in Belize was long, and slow, and torturous. Deran pulled you apart over and over and over again until you were a shuddering mess beneath him, just begging for more. It felt like an encore – like he’d been saving everything for last. His teeth in your skin, his fingers clawing red; his mouth sharp and biting and crashing against yours.

You remember wondering if there was any part of you he hadn’t marked. That if they found your body, right here, there’d be any doubt about who you belonged to.

“You doing this with other guys?” he’d asked, apropos of nothing, and when you looked over to him he wasn’t even facing your way.

“No. You?”

“No.”

You fell asleep like that, with the breeze coming through and the sheets twisted around and all his spit and sweat and spunk clinging to your skin. You fell asleep like that, but you woke up a little different – with his fingers twisted in yours and his mouth gentle on your throat and his voice soft in the air, _Adrian, Adrian, come on_.

You woke up a little different, and you left Belize a little changed, and that was the best of what you had.

The best of Deran too. 

*

You kissed a girl in junior high because she dared you to. Zoe, was her name, with soft pink lips that tasted like berries and curled at one side like she knew you were lying. It was the first and only time you ever did it, and maybe you knew straight away, you’re not sure. 

You kissed a boy a few years later because you dared him to. Kyle, with his hair buzzed short and his nose a little crooked and his hand under your shirt, making sparks. You pushed him onto the sofa, and took all you could get because you knew then, you were sure then.

(You were always sure about who you were; just never really clear on the why, or where.)

It’s Paul, at the moment, with his big hair and wicked smile. It’s Paul with his gentle, reverent sex, and how he never pushes. He never demands.   

“There’s a guy,” you say into the quiet and then realise your mistake. “There _was_. He, uh, he wasn’t a nice guy.”

“Oh, yeah? Does this guy have a name?”

“I could call him a few,” you say, to dodge, and Paul just laughs and lets you get away with it. “It was like, like the first time you take a board out you know? Like, you don’t know what the fuck you’re in for. You have no idea. But once you’re out there, once you’ve got it …”

“You can’t stop,” Paul finishes for you.

“Exactly.”

“I had something like that once.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He cheated on me.”

“Right.” You don’t bother to explain that Paul’s got nothing on you. That Deran fucking other people – women – was nowhere near the worst of it. That he was into so much bad shit (shit he never told you about but you still knew was happening) that half the time it was a relief to know he was just off getting laid.  

“Why are you telling me this?” Paul asks, casually, rolling into you and playing at the hair on your chest. You put a hand on his head, and press your face there, and ask yourself the same question. Who else are you going to tell?

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about him.”

“You’re not over it then?”

You snap up, and away, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I’m just confused,” you say, and it’s probably the most honest thing you can offer him right now. Offer yourself, even. “I don’t know how someone can treat you so badly, how you can _let_ them, and still … still.”

“Do you believe in soulmates?” Paul asks after a beat.

“Jesus.”

“I’m not saying I do, I’m just asking.”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

He comes over to put a hand on your back, and press a kiss to the top of your spine. “If you keep getting pulled back into whatever that is, then maybe – maybe it’s not something you can control.”

You groan, loudly, letting your head fall into your hands. “Don’t say that,” you tell him, because he has no idea. If he knew he wouldn’t say that. If he knew he would be telling you to sever every single tie, and tendril, and nerve. To cut and run. “Don’t.”

You won’t let Deran Cody control you any more.

*

He’d said that it was simple. _Your_ idea of simple was going out for dinner. Seeing a movie or watching a game or telling Deran that if he was going to come over every other night he might as well just move in. Half his shit was lying around at your place anyway

Deran’s idea of simple was fucking you when he felt like it.

“Just, stay,” you would try to tell him, reaching out to pull him back in, but never really succeeding. Sometimes he would kiss you goodbye, take your face in rough hands and bite down on your lip like a promise of what was to come later. Sometimes he’d cover you with a sheet before sneaking out into the night.

And sometimes he’d fall asleep next to you.

“Deran.” You’d nudged him awake with a foot one morning, the clock blinking angrily at you from across the room. “Deran you gotta get up.”

You watched his eyes flutter open, and you’d watched him realise where he was, and he’d just grumbled, _five more minutes_ before closing his eyes again. You’d reached out a hand, stroked gently at his head, and felt something burst open inside you when he just said,

“S’nice,” and fell back asleep.  

Your fingers tangled in his hair and you fell back to sleep too.

*

You’d had a lot of jobs over the years. You cooked for a while, and you did surfing lessons, and you even tried your hand at landscape design until you realised you were too far inland to know what the hell you were doing. If you couldn’t turn it into a surfboard you couldn’t see the point.

The shop’s the only place you can really shut off. Behind a mask, behind a block plane, the music beating through your feet. It’s precise, meticulous, there’s no space for anything else.  There’s only the curve and the line of the board, the shape of what it will one day become. What it will mean to someone else.

Then Deran comes in one morning and stands by the door.

“This is stupid,” you tell him, peeling off your mask. “I thought you said you weren’t here for this.”

“I wasn’t,” he says, folding his arms. “But then I saw you again - ”

“And you remembered how easy I used to be for you.”

Deran just ducks his head. He’s wearing a sleeveless shirt, and his hair’s soft, and part of you is glad he kept the beard. “You were afraid of me. You still are.” 

“I _was_ ,” you snarl at him, and hope that the _not any more_ is heavily implied. “But – but what’s worse is that I was afraid of who _I was_ when you were around. I got so fucking lost in you, in all that crazy, that I started to lose it too.” 

“I’m not that guy any more. I promise you.” 

“Why should that matter to me?” 

“You’re the best thing about me,” he says, and it takes you back to the last time he tried to win you over. The broken, gravelly pleas of _I just want us to be okay_.  

“I haven’t seen you in years, Deran! You don’t even know me any more.”

“Yes, I do. I know you better than I ever knew any one. You’re part of me.”

It’s quiet for a moment, save Chris in the backroom working on a board. “Jesus,” you say on a breath, surprised you’re still holding onto your mask. “Are you gonna tell your brothers that? Are you gonna tell your mom?”

Deran visibly flinches. It makes you feel sick, like bile in your throat, knowing that she still has the affect on him. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going back there. I’m _never_ going back there.”

“You think that fixes it?”

“Of course I fucking don’t! Every day I’m trying to fix me. Every day.” He wrenches a hand into his hair, growling low in his throat. He turns away, then turns back, and his voice trips hurriedly as he tell you, “I’m not drinking, or smoking, I’ve been clean of _everything_ since I got out and  - ”

“So what am I? Part of your twelve step program?”

“ _No_ , but – but I’ve changed.”

“Alright. You’ve changed,” you parrot, throwing down your mask and heading round the board to move closer. “What happens when Baz comes knocking on your door? Or J? Or _Smurf_? You might have changed here, in Florida, two thousand miles from who you used to be – but what the fuck happens when it comes back?”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“And you don’t know that it will!” Deran yells, stepping in a little closer. It’s quiet outside this room – Chris has obviously turned off the machine – you wonder how long he’s been listening. You wonder if that matters to Deran any more.  

“You say you’ve changed but you’re still here, expecting things of me,” you say in a low voice. “Pushing.”

“No, I’m here to do what I should have done fucking years ago, Adrian. I’m here to tell you that you _do_ matter. That you’re the only thing that _did_ matter.” He snaps the space between you with a hand out to grab at your shirt. It’s not forceful, or rough. It feels like he’s anchoring himself to you. “That house, that … it was a toxic place. It nearly killed me. And you were the only thing keeping me afloat. The only real thing.”

“Deran - ”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever known that never wanted shit from me. Never wanted anything _but_ me. And I didn’t know how to give you that. I want to try now. I want…”

He stops, his breath rattling, his face so close you can feel it warm on your skin.

“Deran,” you say again, turning your head, and using a shaky hand to pull him off you. “ _Please_. Just go.”

*

You saw him break open just once. He kissed and he clung and he cried at you, and it was the most honest moment you’d ever shared outside of sex, outside of Belize. You could have taken him inside, you could have let him have what he wanted, you could have accepted this for what it was. Love. Some bruised and splintered form of it – and probably the only sort of love Deran had thought he deserved – but love all the same.

“You can’t make me feel something I don’t,” you’d said instead, even though you both knew it was a lie. Even though you wanted him, like you’d never wanted any one, like you’d probably never want any one again.

It was the nicest thing he’d done for you.

Leaving.

*

You never thought you’d leave California. You thought you’d buy a little house, maybe meet someone, maybe get a dog, maybe settle down. You thought you’d make surfboards until your hands gave way, or until you couldn’t stand long enough to stay afloat.

You suppose Florida can be that too. You don’t have as many friends, and all your family’s gone, and some night’s you’re so bone deep lonely you wonder what’s keeping you here. You _know_ , you always have, you just stopped thinking about it for a while.

“Hey, there’s that cat from the other day,” Chris mutters into your ear when you’re out getting a drink one night. Paul’s here, and so are two of your regulars, Mal and Jordie, and it had been going alright. You were feeling a little buzzed.

Except Deran walks in, with an entourage, and it feels a little like being winded.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” you lie, and quickly slug back the rest of your beer. “I’m just getting another.”

Chris didn’t ask any questions, after Deran had walked out of the shop. He’d given you a look, and patted you on the shoulder, and got on with his work like you’d expect him to. It had always been like that, with other people. Deran had kept everybody quiet, had kept the _words_ silenced; meanwhile he was exposing the truth with his looks, and his body, and his worry. Your friends knew, they saw it, but they kept their mouths shut.

They were smart.

“Adrian, right?” a voice says from your left, as you’re waiting by the bar, and you look to see an older guy giving you a tight grin. He’s all long hair, greying at the temples, his skin a leathery brown.

“And you are?”

“Tom.” You shake the hand he offers you, not really surprised when he adds, “I’m a buddy of Deran’s. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

Tom lets out a gruff little laugh. He reminds you suddenly of Craig. “That you’re the love of his fuckin’ life, for starters.”

You cough around nothing, shocked into looking over to where Deran’s sitting at a far table laughing with some people. He’s slumped, and he’s worn in and he looks okay. He looks happy. “He said that to you?”

“Sure did, man. Honestly, when he talked about you, I expected someone taller.”

“I’m really sorry to disappoint.”

Tom laughs again, clapping you on the back. “Relax, man, I’m just fucking with you.”

“Did he send you over here?” you have to ask, because that’s so far from anything you’d ever known about Deran. He sent people into battle.

“No, no. He just knows he couldn’t stop me.”

“Well, was that all?”

“He said you were a stubborn ass,” Tom tells you, using the hand that’s now on you shoulder to give you a little shake. When you look at him he’s smiling again, and his eyes are bright. He’s honest. “He also said he liked that about you.”

You take the beer that’s been left for you, nodding at Tom as you go. You feel the world shift sideways for a moment, like something locks into place. Deran Cody making friends, Deran Cody bearing truths, Deran Cody saying your name, saying love, saying life.

“Let me guess,” Paul says quietly when you go to sit beside him at your table. His hand curls around your knee, his mouth close to your ear. “The one wave you couldn’t control?”

When you look up, Deran’s watching you.

*

You met him outside a bottle shop, with his backwards cap and a smoke between his teeth. He knew someone who knew someone you knew, and you didn’t learn his name that day, but you remembered his face. You remembered the glint in his eye when he looked at you and asked you for a light.

You saw him again a week later, down by the shore. He had a towel around his waist, the water from his hair trickling down over his body – and he was so tan, you thought. He made you feel like a ghost. “Deran,” someone had said, shaking his hand. Deran, you thought to yourself, and it stuck with you, it stayed.

You saw him again, and again, like your favourite song on a loop – you’d swim and surf and skate together until your other friends gave up and went home. It was all so hazy at the start – who he was outside of this, away from you, _at home_. It took a long time to understand the guy you knew was a lie.  

It took a drunken, stupid, night, the two of you too close to the water where Deran pulled you into the shadows of the pier. He pushed you against a pillar, your face grazing against the wood, and pulled your shorts down around your ankles. It was dry, and it hurt, and it felt so good, you felt so fucking alive.

“ _Fuck_ ,” you remember shouting into the night, before he wrenched your face to him and bit down into a kiss to keep you quiet.

“Fuck,” you said again, softer, as you were coming down, and you felt him laugh against your back.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

(The boy you knew wasn’t a lie. He was just buried so deep in one you couldn’t see the truth when you surfaced.)

*

Deran shows up with hands in his pockets and his head tucked down with diffidence. He’s wearing a t-shirt you recognise from before, and he scratches at his shoulder when he sees you, and you feel like you’re seeing all the layers peel away. One by one down to the bone.

“Hey,” you say, stepping out from behind the door to see him.

“I’m pretty messed up, Adrian,” he says, no preamble, a smile so self-deprecating you almost want to shake at him to stop. “I might always be messed up.”

“Yeah.”

A few cars pass, and a neighbour's dog barks in protest. You look at him, and how he’s trying not to look at you, and you know it’s true in a lot of ways. What he’s been trying to tell you for months. He has changed.

“You should know,” he finally says, a little cough like he’s forcing it out. “I’m sticking around. I’ve got a job lined up. I’ve got friends here.”

“Okay,” you concede, with a nod, and it doesn’t twist you up on the insides any more. It feels gentler. It simmers. 

“That doesn’t mean – I said all I could say, alright? I’m gonna stop now. I’m gonna leave you alone.”

You almost want to laugh at that, _alone_. You’ve built a whole world around yourself to keep you safe from him, only to realise that he’s the axis that kept that world spinning. That you could go on with life without him, but you're not sure you would be living.

“Deran,” you call, as he starts to walk away. You smile when he almost falls over, quickly turning around.  “I just made some coffee. Do you want to come in?”

“Yeah,” he says, and you can hear the echo of what he’d said last time, when he’d shown up at your door to make peace.

_I just want us to be okay._

You think you might be.

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr.](http://thefancyspin.tumblr.com)


End file.
